Remote Sensibilities: Discourses of Technology and the Making of Indonesia’s Natural Disaster

Abstract

During the extended El NinÄ o drought of 1997-8, fires devastated Indonesia's forests, creating a vast shroud of smoke that reached as far as mainland Southeast Asia. This article examines the interpretation of these fires Ð their causes, damages and solutions Ð by the Indonesian government, international donors, environmental activists and local farmers. It explores the contexts and consequences of these discourses of disaster, and specifically investigates the central role of remote technology Ð a`hegemonic' representational tool, in some circumstances creatively appropriated to serve new democratic agendas. A narrow focus on remotely sensed data is not strictly a methodological but also a political choice, one which obscures alternative experiences of disaster and produces solutions that do not address long term social and political processes leading to the fires. What is missing from most current analyses of the fires, and from remote assessments in general, is a textured understanding of social landscapes and the role they play in creating fire hazards.

Change in vegetation cover in East Timor, 1989–1999

“…In the application of remote sensing/GIS technologies, Harwell (2000) explains that the ownership of discourse around the causes of change detected through studies (such as the present) can lead to an imbalanced view or can obfuscate alternative realities. The discussion of possible causes of identified landscape transformation in this article relies largely on the results of data interpretation and on published information on social and economic circumstances underlying these changes.…”

“…be fully understood through the use of remote sensing/GIS technologies, however, is the ethnographic context and the history of change which colonialism had brought to East Timor (Harwell, 2000). This was an essential driver of environmental change, and the preceding discussion has merely illuminated a brief period of this history.…”

Whose Diversity Counts? The Politics and Paradoxes of Modern Diversity

“…With greater precision, alongside programs like Google Earth that make remote sensing more accessible and widespread [48], satellite imagery has become a ubiquitous feature within the -visual culture‖ of tropical deforestation [49]. Despite its appearance as a detached and objective perspective on tropical forests, however, satellite imagery is itself a form of knowledge that privileges certain types of measurement and categories, while occluding other variables [23,50]. This underlying subjectivity is particularly evident in cases where proponents of extractive industry employ satellite imagery to dampen and counter environmental arguments against their projects.…”

Public Health in the UK Media : Cognitive Discourse Analysis and its Application to a Drinking Water Emergency

“…Perhaps due to this belief or perhaps due to lack of clarity over human responsibility, media coverage of natural disasters can be prone to an absence of human agency (Harwell, 2000).…”

“…Therefore, assigning causality to the crisis and the floodwater is one way to tone down human responsibility for the crisis. This method of evading human accountability is in fact quite common after disasters; the crisis is often represented as the most active agent with a life of its own (Harwell, 2000, Cowan et al, 2002.…”